Allo Protocol
A general purpose protocol for the efficient allocation of capital.
Introduction
Allo Protocol is a set of smart contracts that enable the democratic allocation and distribution of capital. The protocol was developed by Gitcoin to power the Grants Stack, but is useful beyond grants and beyond quadratic funding.
Why a Protocol for Capital Allocation?
Crypto has given us an incredible set of tools for forming capital: token drops, NFTs, treasury diversifications, staking and yield, etc. It has also given us democratic and secure ways of keeping that capital safe: Safe, Governor Bravo, among others. But very little of the money raised gets allocated back into the community. Instead, it sits in treasuries while flame wars wage on in governance forums over peanut-sized funding decisions.
Why?
Well every proposal has root-level access to the treasury and the entire community gets to weight in on every funding decision.
Allo gives communities a tool set to experiment with capital allocation. Pick a mechanism (like Quadratic Funding), eligibility criteria for projects and voters, and how to distribute the capital (lump sum, milestone-based payments, etc).
Our hope is that communities will use Allo to build and experiment with multiple different ways of allocating and distributing capital in their community and that the movement of tokens will unlock communities to grow and achieve their missions.
Use Cases
- Grants Tooling
- Bounties and Requests for Proposals
- Creating circular economic systems
- Quadratic Funding
- Mechanism design and experimentation
- Wrapped voting
Learning More
You can use this documentation to get an overview of the protocol. We also welcome contributions and would love for you to get involved. Finally, you can head to gitcoin.co (opens in a new tab) to keep up to date with protocol releases.
Community
- Twitter (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub discussion (opens in a new tab)
- Apply to join dev community
Current Status
We are currently in the process of finalizing Allo v2. That means the contracts
may diverge slightly from what is described here in the documentation. For the
latest version of the contract, please see the main branch of the allo-v2
(opens in a new tab) repository on GitHub.
High-level dates on the roadmap to v2 launch:
- July 31st: Deploy to testnets (Sepolia, Goerli, Optimism Goerli, and Sepolia PGN)
- August 1st: Community build phase and review
- August 21st: Finalize review, implement final changes before audit
- September 11th: Audit contest starts (estimated)
- October 2nd: Mainnet deploy
Allo Protocol vs the Grants Stack
In addition to Allo Protocol, Gitcoin offers a suite of products called the Grants Stack (opens in a new tab).
Allo Protocol is for people building applications with novel capital allocation mechanisms, like quadratic funding. The protocol contains a registry of recipients (Project Registry), a way to create pools of capital (Pools (opens in a new tab)), and a strategy for allocating that pool of capital (Allocation Strategy (opens in a new tab)). Anyone building custom tools for communities to allocate capital or for projects to receive capital should use Allo.
The Grants Stack (opens in a new tab) is a self-service suite of products for hosting a grants program. For now, it lets you run Gitcoin-style quadratic funding rounds in your ecosystem, but will expand into other forms of grants over time. The product suite offers everything you'd need to run your grants program without writing any code. So if you just want to run your grants program, the Grants Stack (opens in a new tab) is a good fit for you.